I have to admit, I am scratching my head trying to understand what is going on between Barack Obama, the Democratic Caucus, and Joe Lieberman..’Traitor’ Joe seems to come out of this campaign cycle pretty much unscathed ane smelling pretty sweet – even after all he did and said… Why?

Sen. Joe Lieberman told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that he regretted some of his statements attacking Barack Obama during the campaign but declined to offer an apology.

“I do regret as I said to the caucus and afterward publically, there were some things I said in the heat of the campaign that I wish I had said more clearly. Other things, frankly, I wish I hadn’t said at all,” said Lieberman. “That happens to all of us in the heat of it campaign but nonetheless, I regret it and I want to move forward.”

Brokaw pressed Lieberman for an apology. “I heard word ‘regret’ but not the word ‘apology.’”

“You can take from the word regret what you will,” answered Lieberman.

In dealing with Lieberman, Obama, who resigned from the Senate on Sunday, has been well aware of how often legislation fails or succeeds on a single vote. An embittered senator poses particular peril because of Senate rules that allow any one member to grind business to a halt and obstruct legislation.

According to Bob Geiger, the Senate will be voting this morning on what to do about Joe Lieberman – as well as electing leadership for the next Congress. The questions is whether or not to strip former-Democrat Joe Lieberman of his Chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee as punishment for his despicable conduct during the 2008 presidential campaign. Geiger says:

Today’s vote will be by secret ballot but CNN, ABC News and others have reported what I am also hearing from Senate sources: That Lieberman will be allowed to stay on as chair of the Homeland Security Committee but will lose his position as Chairman of a subcommittee of the Environment and Public Works Committee, known as the Private Sector and Consumer Solutions to Global Warming and Wildlife Protection Subcommittee.

This is like giving him fifty lashes with a cooked spaghetti noodle.. What’s the point? He should be removed from the Caucus. At the very LEAST he should be stripped of his Chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Also taking place today (or actually, now NOT taking place), is the issue of Ted Stevens who was facing an expulsion vote in the Senate by fellow GOP colleagues. Beings the final tally of the ballots from the Alaskan Senate race is completed today with the outcome expected to favor Stevens’ opponent Mark Begich, they have decided to postpone that vote.

Convicted Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens will remain a member of the GOP conference in the Senate pending the outcome of his re-election bid.Stevens critic Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, announced Tuesday he’ll hold off on a move to expel Stevens from the GOP conference and strip him of plum committee assignments starting in January. He said some of his colleagues want to see whether Stevens wins another term before voting to sanction him.

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has lost his bid for a seventh term. The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 3,724 votes after Tuesday’s count. That’s an insurmountable lead with only about 2,500 overseas ballots left to be counted.

The Politico has just posted a story on Joe Lieberman’s battle to hang on to his plum committee slot, but Politico kind of buries the lede. The real story here is that Lieberman’s aides are now openly threatening Senate leader Harry Reid by saying that Lieberman will stop caucusing with Dems if his chairmanship is revoked:

“Senator Lieberman’s preference is to stay in the caucus, but he’s going to keep all his options open,” a Lieberman aide said. “McConnell has reached out to him and at this stage his position is he wants to remain in the caucus but losing the chairmanship is unacceptable.”

The obvious winners are Barack Obama, Congressional Democrats, all the volunteers that worked hard to make this dream a reality and the progressives that wanted this change so badly.

Politico has highlighted the winners and losers of this campaign election. I agree that the verdict on the victors will come not from a single night of election returns but from the actions the winners take to remedy the nation’s economic ills and extricate it from two long and costly wars.

President Bush. The worst President in history. The debt, deregulation, the two wars, and his unpopularity helped doom John McCain who voted for Bush policies 90% of the time.

Steve Schmidt. McCain’s main strategist was brought in after a shake-up to hammer Obama hard every day, and he did that with gusto, hatching the highly effective “Celebrity” ad equating Obama with Paris Hilton. Schmidt’s mid-campaign testosterone boost turned off independents, young voters and women. Meanwhile, the base never believed the Arizona senator was one of their own – even when Schmidt succeeded in persuading McCain to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Rudy Giuliani. America’s mayor began the year as the Republican front-runner by making the case for the big-tent GOP approach. He ended it as a caustic Republican attack dog at a time when GOP partisanship has turned off the very independents Giuliani initially attracted.

Bill Kristol. The former Republican White House aide-turned-New York Times columnist was one of the loudest voices in favor of invading Iraq. And he was among the first to suggest Palin could be McCain’s savior. It proved to be a brilliant move. For about two weeks.

Gail Collins did another awesome op-ed about, Is Anybody Happy? She covered everything from George Bush’s speech on Friday to the fatal mistake made by McCain in using “Joe the Plumber” as the centerpiece, in the final days of his campaign. These are the excerpts that I found most noteworthy, also her lessons to be learned are too funny.

First of all, George W. Bush showed up on TV Friday morning to reassure Americans. What could possibly be worse? Everybody knows that anything the U.S. president says is very likely wrong, and certainly won’t happen. If he announced: “I’m sending government agents to Spokane to arrest the looters,” we would expect that the officials would get lost, nobody would be arrested, and the looters probably never existed in the first place.

So hearts sunk throughout the United States when Bush appeared at a Chamber of Commerce gathering to say that the economy would recover.

“America is the most attractive destination for investors around the globe. America is the home of the most talented and enterprising and creative workers in the world,” said the president, who also insisted that “democratic capitalism remains the greatest system ever devised.”

Which translates into: All the money is going to Asia, nobody will ever get a job again and Karl Marx was right after all. Bummer.